What Was the All-Time Best Summer for Movies?

[Editor’s note: Your devoted Flavorwire team is taking Memorial Day off, but we’ve left you with some of our favorite summer-related features that you may have missed the first time around. This post originally ran April 24, 2012. Enjoy!]

We’ve made clear, on several occasions, our deep affection for Austin’s (and soon to be New York’s) Alamo Drafthouse, a venue that has, year after year, taken cinema obsession and programming ingenuity to new heights. This summer, however, they’ve outdone themselves: they’re paying a 30th anniversary tribute to the summer of 1982 with a series of 35mm screenings, timed to the original opening weekends of the movies that made up, in their words, “the greatest summer of movies… ever.”

That, friends, is a tall claim, and one that we felt required further investigation. After the jump, we’ve assembled ten possible contenders for that crown, along with the highlights of that particular season of movie-going; cast your ballots (or add your own alternates) in the comments.

1982
HIGHLIGHTS: E.T., Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Thing, TRON, The Road Warrior, Conan the Barbarian, Rocky III, The Secret of NIMH, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Okay, we kinda see what the Drafthouse guys were getting at here. That’s a bumper crop of fun, iconic movies, and it’s a little astonishing to see them all lined up like that: two quintessential Spielberg movies, the best of the Star Trek flicks, the movie that made Arnie a star, and the Phoebe Cates bikini scene. Then again, it was also the summer when Annie came out, and good luck getting that song out of your head now.